Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 9, 2021 12:44 UTC (Wed) by karim (subscriber, #114)
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

By far the biggest thing I'm seeing here is yet another GNU package being unGPL'ed. At some point in the future TBD will the GNU project be seen as an intermediate transition point where it'll have fuelled "open source" but will itself have become obsolete?

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 9, 2021 13:00 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> By far the biggest thing I'm seeing here is yet another GNU package being unGPL'ed.

Not quite. This is an alternative from scratch implementation. The biggest motivation I would imagine is the rapid adoption of Rust and willingness to adopt new features and taking advantage of new capability in the Linux kernel. GPL has been falling out of favor for many of these new projects for other reasons and that is not a new trend

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2017/01/13/the-state-of-open-...

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 9, 2021 13:01 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> By far the biggest thing I'm seeing here is yet another GNU package being unGPL'ed.

What stops anyone from making non-GPL copies of GPL software (besides the "don't look at the implementation" general copyright considerations)? Is there something special about GPL software that means no one can have a valid reason to not use it and instead require something permissive?

> At some point in the future TBD will the GNU project be seen as an intermediate transition point where it'll have fuelled "open source" but will itself have become obsolete?

Note that I'm not thrilled about the GPL becoming less prevalent overall, but this sentiment seems kind of misguided. If GNU wants to stay relevant, it's not going to do that my resting on its laurels. Clang showed that to GCC at least.

Big business isn't helping this situation, but sitting on the sidelines and pouting "why does no one want to use me?" isn't a compelling reason to use that software.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 9, 2021 23:22 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (3 responses)

The 1995 GNU Project was doing a very good job of providing something close-enough to the base of a contemporary Unix workstation, once you added X and Linux and a bunch of other stuff.

In 2021 the FSF have decided that their guiding light is a guy who needs assistants to book travel so he doesn't have to use JavaScript and browses the web via email. The FSF endorses a hardware strategy that valorises leaving your hardware with known-insecure firmware installed because installing security updates from the vendor is "unfree" and bad.

The FSF have chosen to become irrelevant to how people want to live their lives and interact with technology in favor of a weird, insecure, retrocomputing experience, rather than providing meaningful free alternatives. It's no wonder that people are interpeting this is damage and working around it. It's unfortunate that this has tainted people's impression of the GPL; I'm very keen on the share-and-share-alike philosophy that rests at its core. But it's become tainted by the FSF's disinterest in learning what humans want to do, in preference for hectoring developers and users alike.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 0:38 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> The 1995 GNU Project was doing a very good job of providing something close-enough to the base of a contemporary Unix workstation, once you added X and Linux and a bunch of other stuff.

> The FSF have chosen to become irrelevant to how people want to live their lives and interact with technology in favor of a weird, insecure, retrocomputing experience

In other words, you're saying the world changed, but the FSF did not?

(The FSF was never particularly aligned with how "people want[ed] to live their lives and interact with technology". They've been pushing against the grain from the very beginning!)

> rather than providing meaningful free alternatives

Sure, the FSF, with its couple-hundred-thousand/year budget and one full-time employee, is somehow supposed to out-produce Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc etc combined. Plus a couple dozen data centers. Gotcha.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 2:11 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

That's capitalism. Adapt or die.

If the FSF wants to fritter away its goodwill on irrelevant work that few people care for, well, it's their organization to run as they see fit. But IMHO it's unwise to play such dangerous games with the GPLv4 (or GPLvN+1) relicensing rights. If they continue on their current path, they will eventually run out of mindshare, donations, and ultimately cash reserves, and GPLv4 will get auctioned off to the highest bidder. That will be interesting to watch, but I sincerely hope it doesn't happen for a long time.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 3:02 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

My point, again, is that the FSF has been "irrelevant" for most of its existence, subject to endless scorn and derision. For a brief period there was superficial alignment with business interests ("you mean I don't have to pay for this software or compensate its authors?" quickly morphed to "how DARE you place conditions on my use of the software I didn't pay for!") but outside from a few high-profile exceptions, that bubble has long since deflated.

And that's fine; Good riddance.

The FSF, GNU, and copyleft in general are slowly reverting back to what it was before the big venture-capital dotcom bubble; ie folks writing software on a volunteer basis for largely ideological reasons. As long as there are folks who believe in those principles, it will continue. If not, then, well, nope.

Speaking of capitalism, at the end of the day, what the average user calls "software" (or "app") is actually a "service". You can't compete with services by providing software.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 1:58 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

There is no moral, social, or legal requirement that other parties do free work to maintain the GNU project's political influence over FOSS - given the type of people it tends to attract as of late I'd say the opposite is true. If it wants to remain relevant, it needs to keep up on its own dime.